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For any Game of Thrones fans out there, I’ve created a neat little interactive visualization. It ranks characters by how many episodes they’ve been in, makes note of who’s alive and who’s dead, and allows you to go backwards in the show’s history to see how things have developed over time.

It also reveals some interesting stats:

After 40 episodes, the show has around ~140 notable characters.

The show seems to kill an average of 13 notable characters per season, or 1.325 per episode.

37.1% of the notable characters have been killed off so far.

You can see a spoiler-free version of the visualization below (character avatars and death information has been removed):

The chart is written on top of d3.js, which is a web-based visualization library. I learned how to use it earlier this year and have been on the lookout for projects I could use it for. After seeing the bubble chart from Matthew Daniels’s Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop visualization and noticing it was based on an example by Amelia Bellamy-Royds, I decided to see if I could create my own bubble chart.

D3 Context Menus

I didn’t see any d3.js context menu plugins while doing this project, so I wrote my own. I could have used a jQuery plugin, but I wanted to keep as much of the code within the D3 way as possible (it just made working within their event structure easier).

Other Game of Thrones Visualizations

So there’s are plenty of other Game of Thrones visualizations out there. If you’re looking for more, I’ve compiled a short list below of some of the best ones I’ve found.

A couple of weeks ago I was having one of those Fridays where I was just kind of dragging. Right before I was about to clock out and go pick up my son, a message from “Facebook Security” popped into my inbox. Since I hadn’t submitted any reports since last year, I was confused. Was this because I had done something wrong? Was my account hacked?

I opened the message and read the following:

Remember this report? 🙂 Definitely an unusual timeline and one that should have been much, much shorter. We do have a fix for this that we’re finally working to deploy. We hadn’t forgotten about your report, though, and we still want to send a bounty of $1500 in appreciation. Again, it should have been sent way sooner, but we appreciate your patience with us and I assure you this timeframe is not the norm.

Whoa, what a way the end a week! I had to reread the submitted report twice to remember what it was about.

Last year I briefly got into bug hunting and had ended up submitting a few vunerability reports. This particular report was put in late last Fall. It was kind of a complicated exploit, and for it to work, you either had to lock down your own friends list and target one or more of your friends, or target someone who had their own friends list locked down. Once that step was out of the way, you could setup your webpage to detect when these particular people visited your site. I thought it was too minor, but ended up submitting it after my office mate told me to go for it.

Originally I had heard back from Facebook’s security team that they were looking into it, but shortly after that correspondence I submitted two other reports and subsequently forgot about this one. Even though it’s been a while, it’s pretty cool they didn’t forget about it. Due to it being pretty obscure / minor, I wouldn’t have batted an eye if they had ignored the report.

Bing Bugs

I had a similar experience with Microsoft’s Security Center last year, though the outcome was more of a buzz kill. I had decided to take a look into their bounty program, and after poking around a bit, I found some CSRF bugs in Bing Rewards. The bugs allowed any third party web site the ability to check and see if a visitor was a member of Bing Rewards, to get their point count, and to change some of their settings (like what their reward goal was). Even though none of this was a big deal, I thought it was enough to at least get listed on their acknowledgments page.

Sadly I was mistaken. After I filed the report they generated an internal ticket and the bug was passed around. Then it was radio silence. 4 months later I got an email with this message:

We investigated the reported issue and the behavior is by design to ensure Rewards user can earn credits. We will be closing this MSRC case, please let me know if you have any questions.

None of that made any sense. My impression was they didn’t care and just wanted to close out one of their old tickets. It made me a little sad, but thankfully I didn’t spend too much time investigating their services. If I ever get back into bug hunting, I now at least know to avoid their program.

patorjk.com Scrolling Text Time Waster Bug

A couple weeks ago a friendly visitor named Cayd reported a Path Disclosure bug in my Scrolling Text Time Waster. There’s no bounty program for this site, but it was definitely cool that he shot me an email letting me know about it. Since I’m now writing an article on bug hunting, I figured I’d give him a shout out.

A couple weeks ago I was offered a review copy of an Une Bobine. The device looked kind of fun, so I decided to try it out.

Une Bobine is an iPhone charger, sync, and stand that’s made from a flexible metal cable. This cable can be bent and shaped to create unique setups. In the pic to the right you can see it twisted both into a practical stand and into a stand where I’m just seeing how high I can get the phone. The pluses for this device are that you can facetime without needing to hold onto the phone, that you can take time lapse photos, and that you can shape the cable so that it isn’t in your way.

The product made its original debut into the marketplace in 2012 after a very successful Kickstarter campaign. This success ended up breathing life into the small company behind the device, and since that time they’ve repeated this recipe by funding most, if not all, of their products through either kickstarter or indiegogo crowd sourcing campaigns. I mention this only since it’s kind of interesting – 10 years ago this kind of company probably wouldn’t have been able to exist.

Anyway, to give the product a thorough look I let my wife take it to work for a few weeks to see what she thought. It seemed pretty durable and she liked that the cable didn’t get in her way. It was also fun to play around with, making it sort of like an adult tech toy. The only negatives either of us could see with the product were that you couldn’t have your phone in its case while charging and that it was a little troublesome to use in the car. If you choose to use it in your car, you will want to test out your setup to make sure it wont fall over or get in the way of the radio.

Overall its a fun product. If you’re looking for a tech device to play around with, it’s something that can provide you some entertainment and utility while you’re at your computer. Lastly, the cable’s name is a little strange, but that’s because it’s French. Translated, “Une Bobine” simply means “a coil”.

Have you ever wondered what your Facebook likes say about you? And if there are any people whose posts you seem to favor? I was curious, so I decided to dig around and see if I could find some stats for likes. I couldn’t, so I decided to turn to the Facebook API. Unfortunately its like information seemed limited for privacy reasons*. Next I tried to get the information from the export feature Facebook offers. Sadly it didn’t have this data either. However, the activity log page chronicled my like history and was just what I was looking for.

I loaded as much information from this page as I could (for some reason it breaks for me around March 2012), and saved it off to a file. I then wrote a quick script to process the data and plugged my activity log into it. The results that were spit out stated that over the past two years I’d liked 1,088 posts and that of my 133 friends, half of my likes were going to just 5 of them (~4%).

Even more interesting, these 5 people were all family members. I’m not sure if that’s just a side effect of me interacting with my family more than my friends, if my family just posts a lot, or if I’m just ignoring my friends. Whatever the case, I didn’t realize I had such a bias with my likes. Though then again, if my Activity Log wasn’t broken for the pre-2012 time period, I wonder if the results would have been different. I had my first child in 2012, and I like most pics with him in it, so that could have been skewing the results. Also, come to think of it, my dog died last year and I went back and liked a lot of pictures of him in it, so that could be skewing things too.

Though peculiar, I’m only one data point, so an analysis of my data doesn’t really say anything about anyone else. If you’re curious about your own liking biases, I’ve put the script online as a gist.

Other Analysis

I’m not the first person to want to analyze their data. Wolfram Alpha has an online app that does an in-depth analysis of a person’s Facebook data. And while it delivers a treasure trove of neat information (example: my friends fall into 5 different groups of connected users), it fails to say much about likes.

Other, less public tools**, have been developed to comb through this like data though. Dr. Jennifer Golbeck gave a Ted Talk last Fall on what your likes say about you and how they’re used by companies. In it she mentions how researchers were able to correlate IQ with people who liked the Facebook page “Curly Fries”. She also mentions how many other attributes such as sexuality and religion can be predicted to a high certainly based on what you like.

It’s probably a no-brainer big companies like Facebook and Google are mining this info for ad purposes. I couldn’t find information on Facebook’s analysis, but Google actually provides a page where you can see what they think of you. However, it’s pretty simple, and I’d be surprised if that was all they had.

Conclusion

I’ve only done a simple analysis of my own data, so there’s a lot more to say for this subject. However, it was kind of eye opening to see where most of my likes were going. Additionally, I think it’d be interesting if there was an app you could use to analyze your own data to see what it said about you. Golbeck joked about starting a company that would sell reports about potential employees to HR people – but, I think it’d be useful if people could generate those kind of reports about themselves. It could help you learn things about your subconscious behaviors or possibly better control your online image.

* Before posting this, I revisited the Facebook API, and I think the data I gleaned from the activity log could also have been retrieved through a bunch of FQL queries. If I were to write a proper app, I’d probably try and use FQL, however, writing a script to parse the activity long was pretty quick and painless.
** I could only find studies, I couldn’t find any source code.

I wrote this review back in November of 2011. While cleaning out my blog’s draft folder I realized I’d never gotten around to posting it. Since it’s a good tech/geek read, I figured it was better late than never.

Ghost in the Wires

I went on vacation recently and needed a book for the rather long plane ride. After reading a sample chapter of Kevin Mitnick’s new autobiography, my interest was piqued. I had remembered reading about him and the “Free Kevin” movement back in ’98, and at the time I didn’t understand why people were getting behind this guy. He did a bunch of bad stuff, why should he be free? Since it’d also probably cover some interesting computer security topics, I figured it be both educational and entertaining. I picked up a copy and by the time I was arriving home, my hopes had been met.

Mitnick gained massive media attention in the mid-to-late 90’s when he was on the run from the FBI for various hacking related offenses. He was eventually captured, and spent 5 years in prison. In his new autobiography, “Ghost in the Wires”, he chronicles his escapades and details how he compromised so many systems. Surprisingly, it mostly through something called Social Engineering, which can loosely be defined as “the manipulation of people to get them to do what you want”.

Mitnick’s tales typically involve him just calling up his target, and simply convincing them to give him certain information or do certain things for him. For example, he was able to compromise the Social Security Administration by pretending to be an investigator from the Inspector General’s Office. He convinced a staff member there of his status, and for several years was able to use her to get privileged information. Here’s an excerpt of where he discusses the ruse:

I said, “We’re going to be needing assistance on a continuing basis,” explaining that while our office was working on a number of fraud investigations, we didn’t have access to MCS — short for “Modernized Claims System,” the amusingly clumsy name for their centralized computer system.

From the time of that initial conversation, we became telephone buddies. I was able to call Ann and have her look up whatever I wanted — Social Security numbers, dates and places of birth, mother’s maiden names, disability benefits, wages, and so on. Whenever I phoned, she would drop whatever she was doing to look up anything I asked for.

Mitnick comes off as smart and very curious, and a lot of his stories are very interesting, but it’s hard to like the guy. He ends up causing a lot of people grief and some of the decisions he makes made me want to facepalm. He continues to hang out with his best friend after the guy steals his wife (this same friend later tries to offer him up to the FBI), he strings along “Eric” even though he suspects the guy is working for the FBI, and he continues to do high profile system break-ins while he’s on the run. Though then again, if he hadn’t made these nutty decisions, there probably wouldn’t be a book to read.

The book starts off a little slow, but takes off once Mitnick goes on the run from the FBI for 2 years. During this time he assumes several identities, lives in a hand full of cities, and breaks into numerous systems. He gleefully details the social engineering tactics he used to do all of this, but when it comes to the technical aspects of his crimes, the book does a little bit of hand waving. The lack of detail in this department was apparently due to a disagreement between Mitnick and his co-writer. Mitnick wanted more detail, while his co-writer wanted to keep the story moving. They comprised, so there are a few side boxes for the more technically inclined, but you typically just get the general idea of what happened.

Overall I thought the book was a fascinating read and a valuable look into how a very successful individual was able to break into many different systems. If you’re into computer security, or looking for a non-fiction thriller, this is something to check out.

A year ago I wrote about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s possible AOL hacker roots. A 1999 angelfire website appearing to be his was uncovered, and it contained two AOL progs by “Mark Zuckerberg” – the Vader Fader and the Zuck Fader. The evidence that the Facebook founder had created progs in his youth was pretty compelling, and now AOL’s former CEO Steve Case has further verified this claim in his recent AMA (Ask Me Anything) by stating the following to someone who was apologying for their role in the AOL hacking scene:

Yikes! Well, I’m glad you got this off your chest! 🙂 The hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us. As AOL grew in prominence, it became a big target. Of course, some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things. It sounds like that is the case with you, and it also was the case with Mark Zuckerberg! Went I first met him 6 or 7 years ago he said he learned how to program by hacking AIM! But, thankfully, rather than focusing on bring AOL down, he shifted to build Facebook up!

This probably means the Zuck had a collection of progs, knew about the various AOL *.bas files, and knew about AOL ASCII Art. That’s kind of cool when you think about it. I imagine he’s the most famous former AOL hacker.

A little over a year ago a coworker pitched a snunkworks-type project to myself and another team member. Separately the three of us worked on PHP/MySQL and Java/Oracle projects, but he wanted the new project to use the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS and Node.js) since JavaScript was something we all had in common.

My interest was piqued, but I was a bit skeptical. I felt the stack was a little too trendy, and for whatever reason, I singled out AngularJS as something I wasn’t so sure about. I felt it was too new – something that was hot at the moment, but might not be hot in 6 month’s time.

At my insistence, we spent a couple weeks comparing Angular and Backbone.js, a framework which had a more established reputation. By the end of our comparisons though, I had done a 180 and was completely sold on Angular. For the remainder of the development I focused mostly on the Angular side of things and loved it.

At the same time I also enjoyed Node. However, its async nature was kind of a pain in the ass and its biggest benefit was really just keeping a common language across the whole project. For Mongo, I had mixed feelings. The flexibility was kind of cool, but relational databases, with their transactions and joins, are a lot easier to work with. Mongo and Node were neat, but they both had weaknesses you had to be careful about. Angular, however, really felt like something that would be a good fit for any type of web project – large or small, complex or simple, etc etc.

The experience left an impression on me, and a few weeks ago I decided to accept a job offer at a new company as an AngularJS developer. It was kind of hard to leave my old job, as I really enjoyed it, but I felt it was time to venture out into new waters.

It’s neat to think that 5 years ago I was programming test equipment in Tcl/Java, and now I’m a front-end Angular guy. I guess that’s just the nature of software development though, you’re always continuing to evolve. Also, like always, work wont get mentioned in this blog again unless its related to a major life change, so in my next post I’ll be back to talking about some random tech topic or updates to this site.

Speaking of which, updates to this site have been kind of sparse lately, and I’m sorry about that (especially if you’ve submitted as keyboard layout because I’m way behind in reviewing those). The job switch ate up a lot of time, and a planned vacation to Chile also ate up a lot of time, but now that those two events are over with, I hope to get back to more regular updates.

Also, in case you’re interested, the images in this post come from RedditGetsDrawn, a very cool place where artists draw pictures of submitted photos.

I don’t normally do reviews of tech devices, but I was recently offered a review copy of Nomad’s ChargeKey, and since it seemed like a neat little device, I decided to check it out.

ChargeKey is a portable lightning cable that fits on a keychain. It comes in both a lightning (iPhone) and micro-usb format (Android / Windows Phone). The idea behind it is to allow people to always have a cable to plug-in to a USB port if they need to charge or sync their phone. If you use a laptop or have a keyboard with a USB port this is really convenient. The cord is also flexible, so technically you could also plug it into the a USB slot on the back of a desktop tower too.

Priced at $29, it costs $10 more (or 53% more) than a normal lightning cable from Apple. This means you’re basically paying $10 more for the added convenience of a short portable cable. That’s a little high, but not too bad.

One thing I’m not completely certain on is its durability. Their marketing material mentions that its made with “high grade plastics from Bayer”, but I wasn’t able to find any information on if it was water proof (so I assume its not). I also wonder about the long term wear and tear the device can take, though for something this new its probably too early to tell. After 3 weeks I haven’t encountered any problems though.

Other than that, there’s honestly not a whole lot to say. It’s a simple product that lives up to its expectations. If you think its something you’d like, I’d definitely recommend it.

Most people know what ASCII Art is – its art created by arranging text into pictures. ANSI art is also text art, but it’s a little more special. It allows you to create text art that includes additional text characters, color, and limited animation. It gained popularity in the tech underground of the mid-80’s, and a community of artists emerged and flourished. It’s hay day was short lived though. In the 90’s unicode became the standard for encoding text, and since ANSI Art was based on IBM’s extended ASCII* character set, its presence became more and more uncommon.

These days the most editors can’t open ANSI Art files. If you try to view them they just wind up looking like gibberish. This doesn’t mean the art form is dead though – fans of the genre have gone out of their way to create special editors and viewers so that the art can still be appreciated, but the community is much smaller than it once was.

The Lost Fonts

About a year ago, someone named Aaron Haun sent me a zip containing over a hundred user created ANSI art font files from an old DOS app called TheDraw. He thought I might be able to provide a place to preserve them since I’d done so for the AOL Macro fonts. The only problem was neither of us knew how to decode the files within the zip.

Aaron’s ASCII Tattoo

Armed with copies of TheDraw and ACiDDraw, I decided to do some ASCII archaeology. I ended up going through the same rigmarole I did when I was trying to get Mark Zuckerberg’s Vader Fader to work, and was able to load up the old DOS apps on a Windows 98 virtual machine. This unfortunately didn’t help much, but it was cool to see the old apps in action.

After some more research, I learned most of IBM’s Extended ASCII characters had unicode counter parts. Since unicode is easy to display, I wrote a script to process the font files and return unicode compatible versions. This script also stripped out the color information. Though I felt the colors were neat, I couldn’t figure out how TheDraw was encoding them**.

What was left were some pretty neat ASCII fonts from the late 80’s / early 90’s. Created for use in emails and on old BBS systems, today it appears these fonts have mostly disappeared from the internet. After talking with Aaron, the only two sites that appear to host ANSI art font files are archives.thebbs.org and slbbs.com, and in both cases you’ll need a special ANSI art viewer. Aaron told me he originally grabbed the font zip from ASCII Artist Roy/SAC’s web page (roysac.com), but that site appears to have been shutdown a year ago. Roy/SAC does still have a deviantart page though, and you can see what his site used to look like at the internet archive (NSFW-ish).

With the fonts in hand, I decided the best thing I could do was convert them into FIGlet fonts so people could once again start using them. I created simple web-based FIGlet Editor to assist in the process, and ported over the fonts I felt looked best going from ANSI to FIGlet. Sadly this means I only ported over a hand full (10 total), since a lot of ANSI’s charm is in its color. Plus, even with the decoded files and my editor, it took a decent amount of time to make the fonts.

You can see what the ported over fonts look like in the screen shot below or you can browse the “ANSI FIGlet Fonts” section of TAAG and use them yourself. Later this week I’ll also add them to the figlet.js repo if you want to download the individual figlet files.

You can see what the originals look like on Roy/SAC’s old font page (internet archive link). At some point it might be interesting make something that would show the ANSI fonts as they once were, but for now I thought it’d be cool to at least provide a way to use some of them in a stripped down form.

More ANSI Art

Notes

* This is somewhat confusing because there’s an extended version of ASCII known as ANSI that was done by Microsoft. This leads me to believe that the name ANSI art was a mistake that wasn’t noticed until it was too late (plus “IBM Extended ASCII Art” doesn’t have much of a ring to it). Making this even more convoluted, Microsoft’s ANSI character extension was never standardized by ANSI, so it makes no sense to call it ANSI in the first place.
** TheDraw didn’t encode colors with ANSI escape codes.

2014.01.22 Edit: I updated the font screen shot to include all of the fonts instead of just 4.2014.05.18 Update: Roy/SAC has recently relaunched his site and created a neat tool for working with fonts from TheDraw.

Last month I discovered Grunt, which is described as a “JavaScript task runner” by its creators. What’s that mean? Well, it allows you to automate mundane tasks like JS-linting, JavaScript/CSS minifying, compiling LESS into CSS, watching files for updates, and other development tasks. I had personally been using makefiles for these types of tasks, but after coming across a Grunt plugin for inlining AngularJS templates, I ended up going down the Grunt rabbit hole and converting over my makefiles to gruntfiles.

Once I had everything working with Grunt, I thought it might be fun to try and write my own plugin. Since Grunt is node.js based, I decided it might be neat to use the figlet.js library I wrote a while back to auto-generate ASCII banners for source code files. figlet.js was originally written to be browser-side only, so I had to do a little reworking to get it to work with node. However, after I had created an npm package for it, I wrote a simple grunt plugin around it called grunt-figlet. You can the result of a test run of the plugin below.

My office mate pointed out that it sort of defeats the purpose of minifying, but I still think its cool. The Text to ASCII Art Geneartor has a similar code comment feature, though it supports more languages. I’ll probably add support for other commenting styles into the grunt plugin later on, though right now I’m not sure if Grunt is used for any non-web development type projects.

After posting the project up someone submitted a change to allow the figlet library to work at the command line. However, I decided to break it out into its own package, so someone could use the library without it interfering with an existing installation of figlet. Ultimately I think it would be cool if this command line app mirrored the behavior of the c-based app. I mentioned the idea on the figlet mailing list, and Ian (the I in FIGlet) seemed to like idea. However, unless there’s suddenly a bunch of interest, right now that’s low on my list of things to do (though if you’re up for the task, feel free to submit changes to it).